The kids in this orchestra live in a villiage built on top of a landfill. But they make the most out of what they have. This orchestra is composed of instruments built from garbage and they seem to work pretty well. [Thanks Bruce]

More LED mystery puzzles

[Henryk] is at it again. He puts together some very impressive circuits that play tricks on your engineering mind. His latest is three LEDs in series. Look closely and you’ll see they’re not performing as expected. Watching the solution to one of his previous puzzles will help you figure out how he’s doing it. His work is simply amazing.

Netbook framed as a dedicated weather station

Not wanting to get rid of old but still working hardware, [Retro Toaster] built a dedicated weather station by mounting the screen, keyboard, and track pad in a picture frame.

If you look at how the USB standard is designed you will see that, because of voltage drop in connectors and cables, there are devices that accept only one cable. If you try to use more, or the device here, they will fail because of the voltage drop. When you add an extra cable and an extra pair of connectors and the multimeter wire resistance and the ampermeter resistance some devices will not work.
I’ve seen this problem on a few webcams and hard discs: even with a 15cm extension they will not start. True, your device will be suitable for some measurements, but not all.
The correct way to build this would be to have an external power supply that allows for current measurement but stabilizes the voltage at the pins of the host connector, to guarantee the voltage is within specs there.

I’m not into it’d not ha/it’s a ck thing. But the musical instruments probably fulfills what a good number pf persons would call a hack& not a thing to it at all. I expected that the cello was going to sound like full load on a manure spreader, but it wasn’t bad at all to my ears

I did some reading up on that and it looks like I should be okay. I setup my ground plain on the same layer as the data lines and used 10mils trace width. Looks like I could improve it with a ground plain on the bottom as well since I have bottom traces that are data lines.

Yeah. The woodwinds are…a little off, but the cello sounds more like it’s from an old recording than like it’s made from trash (it helps that he plays one of my favorite cello pieces).

I don’t play my cello anymore, but I got a hell of a lot out of being in the school orchestra. It makes me happy that kids can get that same experience even if they don’t have access to or just can’t afford “real” instruments.